Fallen
by Jr. Marauder
Summary: Those we love do not leave us, but live in us. This is often thought of as strengthening us to do right, but what when it emboldens us to do wrong? Great people are not the only ones to love, after all. BellatrixRodolphus, DH spoilers. Betaed by H3RM10N3


-1Disclaimer: Not mine, never has been, never will be.

Fallen

He saw her falling, falling, falling for what seemed like ages, but couldn't, of course, have been any more time than it took anything to fall five feet eight inches. Her eyes were wide open and her lips only just parted, an undoubtedly vicious verbal laceration never to come. He turned wildly towards her, his eyes mad, allowing his wand to fly in a wide arc around his body and his head to snap almost 180 degrees around, as though all his joints moved on loose hinges. He was rewarded for his inattentiveness by a stunner that missed his left hand so nearly that its heat radiated upward through his arm and then his body, but instead of hurting him, it gave him exactly the bit of prodding he needed to relax and concentrate. He grit his teeth and looked at the wizard who had hit him with the last spell, a tall, skinny, red headed man who was firing off a selection of the oddest duelling spells he'd ever seen.

"_Tarantallegra_!" yelled Arthur Weasley determinedly.

"_Protego, Sectumsempra_!" shouted Rodolphus.

Arthur ducked and the spell whizzed by where his head had been, flying on to shatter one of many blue-tinted panes of glass set high on one the east wall.

"_Stupefy_!"

Rodolphus blocked it and let if fizzle uselessly into the air somewhere outside. He noticed Arthur's sudden turn to assure himself that the deflected spell hadn't hit any of his side, and in that period of a second or so, he acted.

"_Avada Kedav_--" Rodolphus began, with much more violent thrusting flourish of his oak wand than was probably necessary. He was almost finished with the incantation when something seized him around the knees and knocked him off his feet.

He though he was halfway to the floor when an ill-aimed jet of red light shot past him, and by the feeling of heat surging through is body, he though it to have been a very near miss indeed.

"_Crucio_!" he shouted at the Weasley man. He would have gone for the boy who had tackled him, just as a punishment for his gall, but with the man down first, the boy looked naïve enough to stay put.

Unfortunately for Rodolphus, Colin was a sharp thinker and unwilling to be baited. With a regretful look back at Arthur's writhing form, he took off as fast as he could towards Rodolphus, who was already running.

Rodolphus swore. "Smart boy!" he taunted. "But foolish! Very foolish! _Avada Kedavra_!"

The green light hit Colin in the chest and he crumpled, but the use of the second spell liberated Arthur from the Cruciatus Curse. Rodolphus paused only long enough to ensure that Arthur wouldn't be the next to give chase, and when he saw him clearly disoriented and unable to rise, he sprinted on until he knelt beside his wife.

Bellatrix lay unmoving on the stone floor. Clouds of dust and debris rose everywhere, and as light poured through the few pieces of un-shattered red glass on the west wall, it illuminated columns that hit Bellatrix's fallen body, giving her the look of a kind of bleeding spectre. Her arms were thrown above her head in an attitude that could have been either triumph or surrender, two fingers still clutching her wand, but her booted feet were tangled at unnatural angles in her skirts of cranberry colored crushed velvet. Dark hair almost entirely obscured her face, like a veil, though where a veil would symbolise her devotion to God, this heralded to the world the brazen passion with which she served her master.

Rodolphus, of course, noticed very little of this. He swept the hair from her face to be confronted with the same large grey eyes, eerily immobile and unblinking.

"Bellatrix!" said Rodolphus hopefully. "Bella,Bella!" He knew it was irrational; he'd seen so much death--and caused so much death--that he knew well what it looked like, and it was right before him then.

Not being one of sentimentality or superstition, and knowing that she wasn't either, he didn't bother to fix her hair or fold her dress or give her any of the other trifling attentions usually accorded the dead. The realization came back to him that he was still very much in a war zone, and remembering that a body meant as much to her sense of self and fierce ideology as a collection of old Firewhiskey tops, he ran to help Rabastan, Gibbon, Rowle, and Yaxley as they tried to hold off seven various witches and wizards, at least three of whom Rodolphus knew to be Aurors. He fought as he had done before, as they had done together, and as she would have done herself. Somehow, through all of it, he began to see that she fought with all of them still. Just or not, the passion burnt on.

_"You can kill a man but you can't kill an idea. "  
Medgar Evers_


End file.
